lever fellows, and you glare at each other like wolves."

"Yes, he's a fine, very intelligent fellow," Laevsky assented, ready
now to praise and forgive every one. "He's a remarkable man, but
it's impossible for me to get on with him. No! Our natures are too
different. I'm an indolent, weak, submissive nature. Perhaps in a
good minute I might hold out my hand to him, but he would turn away
from me . . . with contempt."

Laevsky took a sip of wine, walked from corner to corner and went
on, standing in the middle of the room:

"I understand Von Koren very well. His is a resolute, strong,
despotic nature. You have heard him continually talking of 'the
expedition,' and it's not mere talk. He wants the wilderness, the
moonlit night: all around in little tents, under the open sky, lie
sleeping his sick and hungry Cossacks, guides, porters, doctor,
priest, all exhausted with their weary marches, while only he is
awake, sitting like Stanley on a camp-stool, feeling himself the
monarch of the desert and the master of these men. He goes on and
on and on, his men groan and die, one after another, and he goes
on and on, and in the end perishes himself, but still is monarch
and ruler of the desert, since the cross upon his tomb can be seen
by the caravans for thirty or forty miles over the desert. I am
sorry the man is not in the army. He would have made a splendid
military genius. He would not have hesitated to drown his cavalry
in the river and make a bridge out of dead bodies. And such hardihood
is more needed in war than any kind of fortification or strategy.
Oh, I understand him perfectly! Tell me: why is he wasting his
substance here? What does he want here?"

"He is studying the marine fauna."

"No, no, brother, no!" Laevsky sighed. "A scientific man who was
on the steamer told me the Black Sea was poor in animal life, and
that in its depths, thanks to the abundance of sulphuric hydrogen,
organic life was impossible. All the serious zoologists work at the
biological station at Naples or Villefranche. But Von Koren is
independent and obstinate: he works on the Black Sea because nobody
else is working there; he is at loggerheads with the university,
does not care to know his comrades and other scientific men because
he is first of all a despot and only secondly a zoologist. And
you'll see he'll do something. He is already dreaming that when he
comes back from his expedition he will purify our universities from
intrigue a